After a hiatus of more than a year, Japan and North Korea are set to resume high-level talks over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs and the issue of Japanese citizens abducted decades ago, Japanese media said yesterday.
The media reports come after the parents of a Japanese girl who was abducted by North Korea more than three decades ago met their child’s daughter for the first time.
Japan has still to confirm the resumption of talks, but Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared his government’s commitment to find closure for families who were the victims of kidnapping.
“The Japanese government has been working hard to realize the meeting from the humanitarian point of view... We are determined to do our utmost to resolve the abduction issue once and for all,” Abe told reporters.
The restart of formal talks between senior diplomats is expected to be agreed upon as soon as this week, when more junior officials from both sides meet in Shenyang, China, tomorrow and on Thursday, the Yomiuri Shimbun said.
The report said the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau Director-General Junichi Ihara is likely to attend the high-level negotiations.
Japan’s Kyodo news agency carried a similar report as well.
However, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga declined to confirm the reports, telling a news conference: “Nothing like that has been decided yet.”
Formal meetings were suspended in December 2012 after North Korea test-launched a long-range missile.
On Sunday, North Korea test-fired 10 short-range missiles into the sea off the east of the Korean Peninsula, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported, citing unidentified South Korean government officials.
North Korea is not banned from test-firing short-range missiles under UN sanctions, and frequently tests its arsenal.
Japan’s ties with North Korea have been fraught due to Japan’s 1910 to 1945 occupation of the Korean Peninsula, Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear programs, and Japanese anger over the abduction of its citizens by North Korean agents decades ago.
North Korea admitted in 2002 that it had kidnapped 13 Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s to help train spies and said eight of them had died, including Megumi Yokota, who was abducted in 1977 on her way home from school at the age of 13.
Last week, Yokota’s parents spent several days with their 26-year old granddaughter, Kim Eun-gyong, in the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator, a venue Japanese and North Korean officials often use for unofficial contacts.
“It was dream-like,” Sakie Yokota, Megumi’s 78-year-old mother, told a news conference yesterday.
“What we had long been hoping for has come true. Those were miraculous days for us,” she said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion